New Cisco Validated Design for XenDesktop on VNX for 5000 users (Reblog from virtualgeek.typepad.com)

This new 5000-user CVD joins the VSPEX CVDs for both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop in smaller increments – and also CVDs for general purpose cloud use cases based on Hyper-V and VMware.

BTW – you can of course use this to scale up even further in building blocks.

Mike Brennan, the Cisco guy who was one the folks leading this effort comments on his findings through the experience in his blog here. It’s pretty amazing. 5000 users, up and running in 30 minutes. The EMC VNX7500 in the test was used in a “unified way” – using block storage for UCS boot, and as part of a large pool for PVS boot vDisks, but also using NFS for PVS Write Caching. EMC FAST Cache was used liberally to ensure a nice low-latency envelope all the way up to 39 UCS B230 M2 blades for the full 5000 user ramp up test.

Click on the below to download the PDF (warning – it’s a pretty hefty 20MB doc – like all CVDs it is very detailed, which is part of the charm!)